Voice over IP (VoIP) is an emerging technology to package analog audio signal, such as those transmitted over a Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), as information packets and transmit the packets over one or more networks.
FIG. 1 illustrates a VoIP network or configuration 100 wherein conventional packet-switched network 110, e.g., the Internet, provides service link between telephone 140.1 and 140.2. In this illustrated example, a user, at telephone 140.1 enters the telephone number of telephone 140.2 and the information is provided through router 135.1 to gateway 120.1. Gateway 120.1 provides signals, through router 130 to gateway 120.2 to establish the connection, i.e., pathways within network 110. After the connection is established, telephone 140.1 communicates with telephone 140.2 through the established transport connection 138.
With the increasing development of, and dependency upon, networks to provide services, such as VoIP, to businesses and their customers, the need for proper management and operation of the network is increasing more important. Not only does the VoIP service provide a less costly means of providing voice services, it is inherently more reliable in that the voice packets may be dynamically routed in case of fails occurring in the network.
The above referred-to patent application Ser. No. 11/325,109 discloses a method for managing aspects of a VoIP network by modeling components within the network and determining a physical status of the network by analyzing detected or observed events and correlating these events with most-likely causes of the detected or observed events. Such an analysis is referred-to as a root-cause analysis and, more specifically, an availability root cause analysis. VoIP availability root-cause analysis and other similar analysis are presented in detail in the referred-to patent application and need not be discussed in detail herein. Similarly, the aforementioned related U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/823,930 refers to the analysis of performance degradation in VoIP networks.
However, as additional features or services, such as e-mail, instant messaging, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and SAP (Business Service) services are added to the VoIP services, their operation and performance must be managed and monitored to insure their proper operation.
Hence, there is a need in the industry for a method and apparatus for representing, analyzing and determining root cause errors in such additional services in a VoIP network and the impact of such errors.